Sorin Adam Matei
Analysis, research, maps, and essays from Sorin Adam Matei.
Last Christmas when I returned home to Little Rock to celebrate the holidays I had the opportunity to meet Robert Steinbuch, a central figure in a minor Washington sex scandal that may have far reaching implications for how individuals can conduct themselves…
How can the Third World receive internet access? This is a cool project from First Mile Solutions was forwarded to me a few months ago by a friend who specializes in extending internet access to individuals in Third world countries. Essentially they…
Is the World of Warcraft becoming staid? Chris Dalen at Slate thinks that the repetitive nature of the game eventually leads the game to lose its initial novelty. He notes: The real point of Warcraft is to interact with the other players—to…
Saturday, November 18, 2006 I’m going to say something controversial. I know, I know. The internet is for free speech. It is the last remnant of the American sixties counterculture. It’s about self-expression and information sharing. So why do I think it’s…
Just like everything organic or that takes on a life of its own, at some point your online community is going to die. In his book Design for Community, Powazek provides five reasons why communities end and how to handle breaking the…
Last spring I posted about Mydeathspace.com, a web site that tracks the profiles of deceased myspace users. I thought it was interesting that social networking profiles were being adapted to online memorials giving friends and family a place to come online and…
Are we missing the point? A considerable amount of conversation in the class thus far has been focused on how to make a learning community that would benefit the undergraduates, yet we still seem to have a good bit of doubt as…
Content is king! You have to provide them with content that they want in order to get people to come to your site. However, you should be particularly careful in how you integrate it with the community features of your site. Content…
We’ve mentioned a Stephen Colbert and his clashes with Wikipedia a few times in class. As a result of repeated mentions on his show several articles on Wikipedia have been restricted to editing as a result of references on his show (for…
Submitted by: Scott Sanders to the Online Interaction Seminar, COM 632Y, Spring 2006, Dr. Sorin A. Matei, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, 47907. Summary: Social categorization, which is at the heart of SIDE theory, may often prove to be an incredibly powerful…
For many, the democratic and liberatory promise of the internet lies in the potential to allow collaboration, interaction, and exchange of information, ideas, and resources at a scale not otherwise possible (or at least, not highly probable) in a simple offline world.…
In regard to our recent Wikipedia conversations, wanted to share an interesting post on a listserv referencing Nature’s latest response to the Wikipedia v. Brittanica debate. To Britannica’s repartee there was an answer from Nature it
Drawing on the earlier notion of electronic propinquity as postulated by Korzenny (1978), the role of several factors like communication skills, bandwidth, information complexity, mutual directionality, to name a few, all play a part in determining the amount of propinquity achieved in…
Nass (in conversation with Gunn, 2006) commented that the first sound a human being recognizes is the mother’s voice when it is in the womb. Other studies have revealed tentative findings of early literacy emerging in children whose parents read to them…
Many themes resonate and intersect from the readings and in our discussion this week- and several find echo in the words of my son, who, eternally fascinated by the fact that it takes me a year to find my question and then…
The chapter “The Sad Irons†in Robert Caro’s The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power illustrates not only the interplay between culture and technology but also the consequences of lacking connection to a technological network (Caro, 1982). Due to geographical…